"A casual meeting with a member of the International Energy Agency revealed that it is at work on the next Energy Outlook, and is desperate to find a way to show that peak oil cannot arise before 2030. A foretaste of this was also publicly presented in the workshop of the Swiss Federal Energy Office (see Item 334).

"In short, the stratagem is to take the USGS Mean Undiscovered and Mean Reserve Growth combined with Reserve to Production Ratio to demonstrate that there is enough to support growth to 2030, the convenient end of the study period. It evades the implication that production would have to fall like a stone in 2031 to respect even those numbers. The EIA did much the same with its earlier scenarios by assuming a 2% growth to a midpoint peak followed by a 10% decline, that succeeded in delaying peak to 2037, notwithstanding that a global 10% decline offends the physics of the reservoir.

"The significance of this casual encounter is the recognition that the IEA studies derive not from ignorance or incompetence, but deliberately policy, based on the fear that any realistic assessment would cause panic, as the member governments are not remotely prepared. A similar reading has also been reported by a former member of the UK Department of Trade and Industry, who says that the peak and decline of the North Sea is accepted internally, but the Minister finds it politically expedient to ignore the issue. The government is already in enough difficulty over its Middle East policy and immigration issues without drawing attention to the desperate energy crisis that stares it in the face...."